Modern Performance & Resource Settings

[JohnMyers]

Are there recommended performance or resource settings for the peak load described below?

We have invested in a modern Windows 2003 32-bit server with 4 Gig of Ram and two 4-core modern 3 GHz Intel cpu's and a separate RAID 1 pair for the email files; all connected to a 100 MBit Internet connection.

Since another server of ours generates the only emails this server will see, we do not do spam check. We have only POP3 retrieval and no SMTP forwarding.

At peak load we will have 1000 automated desktops using 1000 email accounts checking for POP3 email every 2 minutes, with 500 of them finding an email with a 100K PDF attachment to download.

We will use the Windows Performance Monitor to watch CPU, Disk I/O Queue, RAM availability, Page Faults, and Network traffic (current connections and Bytes transfer/sec). Are there other good resource parameters to monitor?

We are using 2.63 Enterprise version.

[Code Crafters]

Even with a basic server (1Ghz CPU, 256MB RAM) Ability Mail Server on a dedicated server is capable of running 10,000-20,000 users under heavy load with our tests. This includes using all services too. You can certainly support up to 10,000-20,000 but should be capable of running many more than this with your setup. You should certainly have no problems with the scenario and server described.